Posted on

Our Bookshop Store is Up!

We finally have our Bookshop store up! It’s a work in progress, and I’m constantly adding new books I find or remember, but it’s finally up and running. If you like print books, please consider buying through our page there. All proceeds go back to the organization since we are a nonprofit. For readers who prefer audiobooks and ebooks, we will be setting up our partnerships with audiobook and ebook companies soon as well.

Also, since we are now a nonprofit, this website will soon be shifting over to MyCatJeoffryBooks.org. This site will soon re-direct there.

We are hoping to open in brick and mortar form in Spring 2021. We will definitely keep you posted!

Posted on

LOUISIANA’S WAY HOME by Kate DiCamillo

Lovely book we discovered the other day at the Chandler Public Library. LOUISIANA’S WAY HOME by one of our favorite middle-grade authors, Kate DiCamillo, tells the story of Louisiana Elefante, a young girl whose parents have died and who is living with her grandmother.

One day, her granny insists they must leave their home permanently as the day of reckoning has arrived. Granny has done this before but this time Louisiana knows it’s serious. They drive off, leaving behind everything Louisiana has ever known, including close friends, and a beloved dog and cat.

When Granny’s emergency need for medical care causes them to stop momentarily, Louisiana meets some new friends, namely a boy named Burke and his crow, who end up helping her discover who she really is and find home.

Granny, who seems mentally ill, though that term is never used, is irresponsible to the point of being borderline abusive, but somehow you can’t hate her. Louisiana’s voice is so original, so compelling and engaging, you can’t stop turning the pages until you’re sure she ends up well. Readers originally met Louisiana in another DiCamillo book I haven’t yet read, RAYMIE NIGHTINGALE, which of course I now must read.

Posted on

A DOG’S WAY HOME by W. Bruce Cameron

We absolutely loved this book, and were so happy to be able to meet W. Bruce Cameron at the Best Friends National Conference over the summer, which is where we got a copy of A Dog’s Way Home. Above, our very dog-like cat, Rhea, who is always at my feet 🙂

This is a wonderful, very well-told story. And, even though a dog – Bella – is the protagonist, there are lots of cats! Lots of cats. Bella is separated from her mother early on and is taken in by a group of feral community cats who live in a building that is on the verge of being demolished. A cat who’s just had kittens takes Bella in as one of her own. Bella always thinks of her as Mother Cat, and the kittens as her siblings. A young med school student who cares for the community cats, Lucas, finds Bella and takes her in. Lucas lives with his mother, an Army veteran recovering from PTSD.

Unfortunately, Lucas lives in Denver and Denver has a pit bull ban. One of the things this book does so well is show the odious and irrational nature of such a law, especially given that there is no official recognition of pit bull as a breed. That gives power-hungry animal control officers the ability to declare any dog they don’t like a pit bull.

Which is exactly what happens here. Lucas has had run-ins with one such local animal control officer over his insistence on getting the community cats out of the condemned building before it is bulldozed. He works hard with a local animal rescue to do that, but it takes time and the landowner is eager to demolish the building regardless of whether cats are inside. The landowner threatens Lucas with taking Bella away if Lucas doesn’t leave him to his destruction.

As you can see, the dog on the cover of the book looks nothing like a pit bull – and many of the animal control officers in the book question whether Bella is a pit bull. But the landowner is friends with one animal control officer, and that’s all it takes – an officer deeming a dog a pit bull. Bella is banished from town, with Lucas promising he will find a home outside of Denver and will come get her from the foster as soon as possible.

But Bella doesn’t understand since she is a dog. She only knows that she has been separated from her human. So once she sees a means of escape from her new foster, she traces Lucas’s scent back home. The story is her journey, which is quite treacherous given that she is several hundred miles away and there are mountains and wild animals and horrid weather now separating him from home.

Along the way, Bella meets many colorful characters – most of them good, but a few rotten apples. My favorite of the characters is Big Kitten – another cat! Big Kitten is a mountain lion cub who is orphaned by trophy hunters who illegally shoot her mother. Bella mothers Big Kitten the way Mommy Cat mothered her and for a time they pal around together, hunting and sharing food. You know Bella will eventually make her way back to Lucas and his mother but you just don’t know how. There are so many twists and turns you remain on the edge of your seat  until the last page!

There’s so much I left out. There are so many memorable characters and scenes. Every animal lover has to read this book. It’s just packed with gems! The movie comes out early next year and will star Ashley Judd and Edward James Olmos. I really can’t wait!

Another pic of me meeting Cameron at that wonderful conference 😀

Posted on

Review, DEWEY: THE SMALL-TOWN LIBRARY CAT WHO TOUCHED THE WORLD

I can’t believe I hadn’t read this memoir when it first came out in 2008! I’d somehow missed it, but found an updated edition from 2017 on kindle and just finished reading it as an ebook. This version has some added later content, updating us on the lives of the people who knew and loved this charming, wonderful cat and including sweet letters from readers showing just how much Dewey touched the world.

Vicki Myron, head librarian in the small town of Spencer, Iowa, found a tiny kitten, nearly frozen, in the library’s book drop one cold winter morning. She took the kitten to a vet, nursed him to health, and named him Dewey, for obvious reasons 🙂 She kept him in the library, since he was most comfortable there, and he became and remained the official library cat for the next 18 years.

Despite his sad beginnings (who would drop a tiny kitten in a book drop in dangerously cold temperatures?), Dewey turned out to be a very good-natured little cat, outgoing, affable, and happy, jumping up on people’s laps, cuddling in their arms as they read, making friends with special needs children and the elderly. At first there was some resistance – what if people didn’t like cats or were allergic – etc. etc. But everyone grew to like Dewey so much that any objections soon evaporated.

Spencer was a small town deeply affected by the emergence of factory farming, which destroyed small farms and a way of life. Dewey was instrumental in cheering  people up during very depressing times.

Myron is a really interesting, endearing figure herself. She became a struggling single mother after divorcing an alcoholic husband, and a non-traditional student when she went back to library school. Later, she battled breast cancer. Eventually Dewey grew old, and eventually of course he passed on, and Myron, along with the town mourned. In the 2017 edition, you learn about Myron retiring, getting remarried, and the new cat she adopted (Page Turner), starkly different from Dewey, but just as lovable in his own way.  Myron says she didn’t know how many details of her own life she should include, but you as a reader connect to the humans just as much as you do the animals they love. She goes through many of the struggles we all do, and so her story is very relatable.

Wonderful, wonderful book, and I will never forget Dewey, or Myron.

Posted on

Best Friends Animal Society National Conference 2018!

Just got back from the Best Friends National Conference and I am so invigorated and inspired and amazed at all the good work being done out there on behalf of animals! It was my first time at this convention and I met the most wonderful people.

Photo above: I got to meet author / screenwriter W. Bruce Cameron at the members only opening night party. Do become a BF member, by the way: it’s one of the best ways you can spend $25. And I was so excited to meet Cameron. He is one of my favorite “dog authors.” I can’t wait to read his latest – A Dog’s Way Home, and see the movie, which comes out in January!

I also got to meet the adorable and very cuddly internet sensation, Sunglass Cat! What a sweetie. She was born without eyelids so her mom has to give her frequent eye drops and she wears little sunglasses for protection. She really loved being held, and passed around from person to person 🙂

The excellent Jackson Galaxy was there, giving a very informative and entertaining lecture on his Cat Pawsitive program. His discussion of the awesomeness of cat cafes and how they are helping to get people to adoptable cats in new ways really inspired me to get my own bookstore / cat lounge open.

As did a little bookshop the conference had set up. So many books, and the store area was ALWAYS packed. Animals and books just go together! Above are all the ones I bought. Funny, but I listen to the Our Hen House podcast (excellent podcast about animals, with an emphasis on veganism, by the way!) and the second book from the left in the top row – The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World  by Stephanie Feldstein – was the subject of their latest podcast, which I listened to after the conference. Now I’m all the more excited to read that one!

After the conference, we took a little tour of the Best Friends’ NKLA adoption center in West LA. What a beautiful place filled with wonderful adoptable cats and dogs.

Our tour guide mentioned that they have a “read to cats” program at their Mission Hills location up in the Valley, whereby parents can bring their kids just learning to read to read to the cats. It helps both kids with their reading skills and the cats, many of whom love to be cuddled and read to! I signed up to receive information about their program since I definitely want to do that here as well.

I’m a bit overwhelmed with all the information I received – grant writing, fundraising, marketing adoptable animals, building an organization, networking with other nonprofits, promotion, etc. etc. etc. – combined with all the info I’m receiving from the American Booksellers Association on opening a bookstore. But I really want to do this, and the conference made me all the more excited about it!

So no time for lazing around, as this little cutie was in the NKLA kitten room 🙂

 

 

Posted on

Review of GOOD DOG by Dan Gemeinhart

This is a time when I wish I had a good book club for animal lovers because I’d so love to discuss this one with others! GOOD DOG is a middle-grade novel by well-regarded author Dan Gemeinhart. The book begins with Brodie having died and gone to a place between earth and heaven. He senses that the boy he has just left down on earth, Aiden, is in trouble and he wants to go back down and help him before going off to the Forever. But in doing so, he risks losing his soul and living in darkness forever. It’s a risk he has to take to save his boy.

Along the way he meets Tuck, a lovable pit bull, and Patsy, a tough-talking but deep down goodhearted tabby, who are both in the same situation but decide to help Brodie instead of focusing on their own humans. To find Aiden, they have to battle the hellhounds, dark dogs who’ve lost their souls and now need to feed on the light of others. I was on the edge of my seat the whole way through their search for Aiden.

The stories of how each animal died are all so sad and overall this was a real tearjerker. But the expressions of love between each animal and their human and especially between Brodie and Aiden are so beautiful, so moving. I think this is a book kids – and adults who love a good story! – will cherish.

Posted on

Review of JANE DOE, by Victoria Helen Stone

Neither of our silly cats was in the mood to do book poses tonight, so it was sister Sofia to the rescue, even though this book features a cat character 🙂

We got this book as an Advance Reader’s Copy at the RT Booklovers Convention in Reno, which we just returned from and which was, as always, wonderful! The book will publish on August 1, 2018.

We packed this one in our carry-on and are so glad we did; we couldn’t put it down. It’s the story of a woman named Jane who has recently lost someone very dear to her. She knows who is responsible and is hell-bent on getting revenge, however she can.

Jane keeps calling herself a sociopath, and we have to say, she is the most relatable sociopath we’ve ever encountered! As the book goes on, we found ourselves so engrossed in her story, and really rooting for her. At the same time she is plotting revenge, she meets a guy, and adopts a cat, which, of course, we loved 🙂 And they kind of pull her back into life and help her overcome her pain.

JANE DOE is a really suspenseful page-turner with an engaging main character and strong secondary characters. We give it five bonito flakes!

Posted on

Review of CAT AMONG THE PUMPKINS, by Mandy Morton

We’ve been reading a lot of cat cozies lately, and this is a quite original addition to our collection!

The original “cat mysteries” – written by Lilian Jackson Braun and Rita Mae Brown – involved cats as sleuths themselves, at least to an extent. Braun’s cats help their human solve the crime by giving him clues, while Brown’s cats – and other animals – actually speak to each other (though humans can’t understand them), have strong, memorable personalities, and take a very active part in solving the crimes. We personally like Brown’s Sneaky Pie series the best because we like when the animals are memorable and have main roles. It seems like most cat mysteries published lately feature cats mainly as props; they’re really not even characters. Everyone knows cats are darn smart and make excellent sleuths so we’re not sure what that’s about…

Anyway,  Mandy Morton‘s No. 2 Feline Detective Agency series is a welcome deviation from that. In this series, there are only cats; no humans and no other animals. Since the cats alone are the sleuths, they are obviously anthropomorphized. That may confuse some readers. But we find it fun!

In Cat Among Pumpkins, the second book in the series, Hettie Bagshot, a former musician, runs the agency, along with her trusty sidekick, Tilly Jenkins, an arthritic older tabby whom Hettie took in. Later, an aging outdoor tomcat named Bruiser – our favorite! – shows up tired and weary of the outdoors (though too proud to outright admit it). They let him stay in the shed out back and give him a role as driver of the motorcycle-with-sidecar, in which they do their sleuthing. These cats are all drawn so well. Hettie has a little catnip-smoking habit, while Tilly enjoys her tea 🙂

Oh, we should mention that Morton is British and the books are set in England and full of English flavor, which we loved. There’s a Guy Fawkes day celebration that the town is preparing for, and the riverside towns have Stratford-upon-Avon-type names such as Much-Purring-on-the-Rug, Much-Purring-on-the-Chair, and the like. There’s an Indian family – the Doshes – who run a store chain. The mother, Pakora, desperately wants her son, Balti, to learn to run the business, but Balti wants to play sitar professionally – and he’s quite good at it, according to musician Hettie. We enjoyed the camaraderie between Hettie and Balti.

When Mavis Spitforce, who is researching an old, unsolved mass murder, is found dead with her research papers torn up and stuffed into her mouth, Hettie and Tilly must delve back into the cold case to find the killer. Along the way, they come across a good deal of very colorful suspects. Details bring the town and its inhabitants to life and the mystery is well-paced and plotted. We did not figure it all out until the very end. But, as always for us, it’s all about the main characters. They drive the story. And we definitely want to spend more time with Hettie, Tilly, and Bruiser!

Four delicious bonito flakes!

(Above pic is of our sis, Rhea, with the book.)

Posted on

Sneaky Pie Brown Rules!

We are major, major fans of Rita Mae and Sneaky Pie Brown in this household! Sofia poses with the very first in the Sneaky Pie series, Wish You Were Here. The best cozy mystery / cat mystery writer around, in our humble opinion. Brown’s cats – Mrs. Murphy and Pewter – and dog, Tucker, are all so smart and their personalities really shine through. And, most importantly, they help their human solve the crimes. So often, with the current crop of cat mysteries, the cats just sit around looking cute. They have a very minor, if any role. Cats are smart! Use them, mystery writers!

Anyway, our human is working on just such a cat mystery. And, inspired by Sneaky Pie’s Tucker, and our own dear little dog, Sofia, she has decided to add a dog sleuth 🙂